The Hundred Days (31 page)

In a reasonably subtle manner which other people -
their neighbours and the servants standing behind their chairs - would not
understand, they arranged for a private meeting somevrhat later in the day: but
their professional cunning was cast away entirely, when the party came to an
end and the Admiral quite openly asked Stephen to come with him and speak about
his experiences on the Barbary coast and the present state of affairs in
Algiers itself.

This he did, in as plain and straightforward manner
as he could, and Admiral Fanshawe listened gravely, with close attention, never
interrupting. ‘Well,’ he said when Stephen had finished, ‘I am sorry for Omar
Pasha: he was a likeable ruffian. But that is one of the risks a Dey must run:
and from the political point of view I think the Commander-inChief will think
that we gain from the change. Ali Bey has always been more in our favour than
otherwise, and many English merchantmen have had reason to be grateful for his
moderation, and indeed his kindness on occasion. But I am afraid you must have
had but a weary time of it, over there.’

‘Well, sir, that too is
one of the risks of my calling: and I did see some very glorious spectacles in
the Atlas. The only thing I really did regret, and regret most bitterly, was
the spectacle of Surprise’s tender trying in vain to beat against that shocking
wind when I needed so desperately to bring my news to Mahon. Yet even that extreme
vexation of spirit faded when Captain Aubrey assured me that the same blast
must necessarily have confined the Moorish galley to her port, so that my
anguish had no real basis.’

‘It was a shocking blast indeed. All the East India and Turkey ships were blocked in Lisbon, and Lord Barmouth only
just managed to get into Gibraltar.’

‘Lord Barmouth, sir?’

‘Why, yes: he has superseded Lord Keith, and it is
to him that you will have to address your report.’

‘Lord Barmouth,’ cried Stephen, startled out of his
usual equanimity. ‘Oh yes. I remember Lady Keith telling Captain Aubrey that
her husband did not wish for a long tenure, but that they should retire to a
house near the Governor’s cottage until the weather in England grew more tolerable. But I
had not expected it so soon. Nor had I expected Lord Barmouth.’

‘You are displeased, Dr Maturin?’ asked the
Admiral, smiling.

‘I beg pardon, sir,’ said Stephen. ‘I have not the
slightest right to an opinion on the matter: but I did know that Lord and Lady
Keith had a long-standing friendship for Captain Aubrey, and I had hoped that
the Admiral would do everything possible and impossible to reinforce his
scattered squadron, to make the capture of the Arzila galley more probable.’

‘Oh, I am sure that Lord Barmouth will do his utmost,’
said Admiral Fanshawe. ‘But as you know, the forces at his disposal are
precious thin on the ground. Still,’ he said, rising after a pause, ‘I do wish
you the best of success; and at least you have a fair wind for your voyage.’

Chapter Nine

This was the kind of sailing that Stephen liked:
with a gentle breeze a little north of east the Surprise, with her tender under
her lee, made a steady four and a heif knots under all plain sail or a trifle
less, with a pitch and roll that he scarcely noticed. At first he had wondered
at the absence of kites - of royals, studdingsails in all their interesting
variety - and the frigate’s placid advance had vexed him to the soul, until
reflection told him that Jack Aubrey understood his profession as well as any
man afloat, that he was perfectly well acquainted with the relative positions
of Arzila and Gibraltar, and that his plans must take the moon into
consideration- no corsair commanding a galley ballasted with gold was going to
attempt the passage of the Strait when she was full or anything like it Yet
still it grieved his unreasoning part (no inconsiderable part of the man) when
topgallants were taken in at the setting of the watch.

This evening he had come on deck for a breath of
fresh air, leaving the sick-bay (rather fuller than usual with the diseases
often produced by so much shore-leave and by some cases of military fever) in
Jacob’s care, and he sat on a coil of rope right forward He could hear the
children hooting and screeching in the maintop, for the midshipmen and the
hands indulged them extremely: they were picking up an extraordinary amount of
English, and so far they had done themselves no serious injury Yet as he sat
there pondering his mind was very much less concerned with them than with the
new Commander-in-Chief at Gibraltar. Admiral Lord Barmouth - his family name
was Richardson - had been a famous
frigate-captain, with several brilliant actions to his credit. Jack Aubrey was
now a famous frigate-captain, and one or two of his actions were perhaps even
more brilliant. Early in his career Jack had served under Captain Richardson as
a master’s mate in the Sybille: they had disagreed from time to time, never
seriously but enough for Captain Richardson not to ask Jack to follow him when he
moved to his next command, a heavy frigate in which, with a consort of almost
equal force, he destroyed a French ship of the line on the coast of Brittany.
Jack was sorry not to have been present at the battle, but that did not prevent
him from taking young Arklow Richardson aboard a command of his own and even
rating him, in his turn, master’s mate - a senior midshipman. Yet in young
Arklow all the sides of his father (now Lord Barmouth) that Jack had disliked
were reproduced on a larger and more offensive scale; in the severe naval
discipline of the time even a master’s mate could be rude, cruel and
tyrannical, and Arklow made full use of his opportunities. To some extent a
captain is obliged to support his officer, and reluctantly Jack reproved, stopped
grog or imposed some other small punishment.

But presently it became obvious that Arklow had no
intention of attending to his captain’s often strongly-worded advice: more than
that, there was not a single able seaman aboard who did not see that Arklow differed
from his father in being no sailor. When this was established beyond a doubt
Jack got rid of him; but he did so in such a tactful manner that the youth, the
very well-connected youth, was very soon a lieutenant. Then he was given
command of a vessel of his own, where he could flog as much as he chose: not
unnaturally his people mutinied, and the case against the young man was so
flagrantly obvious that he was never employed again.

Barmouth did not openly hold this against Jack
Aubrey- they were members of the same club in London and they exchanged civil
words when they met; but the powers of a

 Commander-in-Chief were very wide indeed, and
if Surprise reached Gibraltar in anything but perfect condition, Barmouth might
very well order another, wholly undamaged frigate to undertake the interception
of the galley.

Indeed, Surprise had not been wholly surveyed and
passed at Mahon: how this had come about Stephen could not
tell for certain, but he supposed that Admiral Fanshawe, who was aware of the
urgency and who was very fond of Jack, had taken his word for the frigate’s
perfect health. This supposition was much reinforced by the quite unusual
activity of the carpenter, his mates and crew, who were busy all day and even
after lights-out in the filling-room, right forward and far down, and in the
forepeak, hammering, sawing, fitting and driving great
wedges. Stephen had pointed out that this was not all that could be wished for,
so near the sick-berth; but observing Jack’s embarrassment, his uneasy and probably
false assertion ‘that it was nothing, and anyway it would soon be over’, he had
not pressed the subject, the more so since Jacob happened to be with them at
the time, tuning a fiddle he had bought in Mahon, so that they might attempt
Haydn in D major.

The carpenter too was oddly reticent, as though
there were something improper or even illegal about the work in the forepeak
and its neighbourhood, a near-furtiveness that took refuge in technicalities -
‘We’m just setting the hawsepieces and bollard-timbers to rights’ - and Stephen
was wondering how far down in the carpenter’s chain of command this attitude
reached when a small pair of calico drawers were flung dowh at his feet and
Poll cried, ‘No, sir: no for shame. There is that heathen Mona running about
mother-naked but for her Algiers shirt: and she has thrown
down her drawers - I have tried to teach her shame and so has Mrs Cheal; but it
is no good. She just says “No English, ha, ha,” lays
aloft and throws her drawers to the wind.’

‘I am very sorry for your trouble, Poll, my dear,’
said Stephen. ‘But I will tell you what I shall do. Barret Bonden is a good
creature, and a capital hand with needle and thread. I shall beg him to make
her a pair - two pair - of a number eight sailcloth trousers,
tight at the top, broad down below and the seams piped with green. Once she has
them on, she will never throw them off, I warrant you. The
same for her brother Kevin too.’

Poll shook her head. ‘When I think of all that good
calico, the cutting, the measuring and the fine stitching - look at these
flounces! I could find it in my heart to have her whipped and put in the black
hole with biscuit and water.’

The trousers were indeed successful: in both cases
they were a cause of sinful pride and they never came off, but hid the
children’s shameful parts day and night, except when they went to the head;
furthermore they promoted such a degree of agility and daring that on any idle
day, with light airs coming from all points of the compass - a make-and-mend
day too, with most of the hands busy with thimbles and shears on the forecastle
or in the waist of the ship - Kevin, on his way to the mainmasthead, discerned
a sail in the west, bringing up a little breeze of its own. Partly out of
mother-wit and partly because he could not remember the English for west, he
climbed the remaining few feet and told Geoghegan, the lookout, who had been
watching a couple of tunny-boats far astern, but who now hailed the deck. ‘On deck, there. On deck. A sail three points on the starboard bow.’ Then some time
later, ‘Frigate, sir, I believe.’ Pause. ‘Yes. Hamadryad; and she is making sail.’

‘What joy,’ said Jack to Stephen.
‘That will be Heneage Dundas out of Gibraltar. I have not congratulated
him yet on his new ship: we will ask him to supper - a pair of fowls, and there
is still plenty of sucking-pig. Killick, Killick, there.
Pass the word for Killick.’ And when his steward arrived, with his invariable
look of ill-usage and a denial of anything, anything at all that might be
alleged against him, ‘Killick, freshen some champagne, will you?’

‘Which we ain’t got none,
your honour,’ said Killick, barely containing his triumph. ‘Not since the
Admiral dined aboard. Oh dear me, no.’

‘Some white Burgundy, then: and let it down in
a net on a twenty-fathom line.’

There was no white Burgundy either; but Killick was
capable of relishing a private victory too, and he only replied, ‘A
twenty-fathom line it is, sir.’

‘Now, Mr Hallam,’ said Jack to his signal
midshipman, ‘Once the usual signals have passed, pray invite Captain Dundas and
Mr Reade to supper. Doctor, should you like to come up into the foretop to
watch Hamadryad make sail?’

It was not really a very dangerous ascent, nor
lofty, and Stephen had been known to go even higher, entirely by himself, but
he had so often been found clinging by his fingernails to improbable parts of
the rigging that Jack and Bonden exchanged a private look of thankful relief
when they had successfully pushed and julled him up into the top through the
lubber’s hole.

Though the foretop was of no great height’it gave
them a splendid view of the western Mediterranean: they were a little late for
some of the phases of Hamadryad’s increase of sail, but still there were many
delights to come: studdingsails aloft and alow on either side of fore and
mainmast, of course, and even royal studdingsails, which was coming it pretty
high, as Jack observed - then a skysail above the main-royal- ‘and look, look,
Stephen,’ cried Jack, ‘the audacious reptile has flashed out a skyscraper- do you
see? The fore-and-aft affair above everything: take my glass and you will make
out its sheet. Did you ever see the like, Bonden?’

‘Never, sir. But once when I was aboard
Melpomene in the doldrums we spread a sail above the royal: though it being
square we called it a moonsail.’

This prodigious spread brought Hamadryad within
pistolshot of the little Surprise before dusk. She clapped her helm a-lee,
swung round in an elegant curve, spilt the wind from her sails, furled her
wings, and sent her captain across the narrow lane in his barge, as neat and trim as the Channel fleet. ‘My dear Hen, how do you do?’
cried Jack, receiving him on the quarterdeck with a hearty shake of his hand.
‘You know Dr Maturin and all my officers, I believe?’ Captain Dundas made his
round of civilities. ‘Come below,’ said Jack, ‘and let us have a whet - you
must be mortal parched after such a frantic spread of cloth. What did you
make?’

‘Only a span above eight knots, even with all our
washing hung out to dry,’ said Dundas, laughing. ‘But it did
please our topmen.’

‘It certainly amazed all ours - amazed and
impressed. Sherry, or a draught of right Plymouth gin?’

‘Oh, gin, if you please. Two of our victuallers
were stove on the Berlings in that shocking southerly blow and we have not had
a drop since then - they happened to be carrying it all. Did the wind reach as
far as you?’

‘Yes: and as far as Alexandria, I believe: a truly wicked
blast. But tell me, Hen’ - pouring him a stiff tot and speaking with an
affectation of casual unconcern that deceived neither of his friends - ‘what
has Lord Barmouth in the way of frigates?’

‘None at all,’ said Dundas. ‘Some battered
seventy-fours, a sixty-four-gun ship, some indifferent sloops, and of course
the flag. But Hamadryad was the last of the frigates. The rest have been sent
to Malta and eastwards: though
indeed he is to be reinforced in two or three weeks, or perhaps earlier. They
too were much delayed by the weather, carrying the C-in-C’s new wife, and had
to put back into Lisbon.’